Style

Your paper should cater to the intermediate audience.

Everyone has their own preferred style of writing. While many things are subject to taste, there are still some suggested guidelines one should follow when possible.

• Avoid using I in your writing whenever possible. In a perspective article, it's acceptable to use a more personal tone. While you should still maintain academic rigor, you can use phrases like "In our view," or "We propose" when presenting your unique insights or interpretations.
• Make sure to clearly distinguish between established facts from the literature and your own interpretations or proposals.
• Citations should always go before the period (i.e., left) instead of after. In-text citations are treated as part of the sentence. When writing for a scientific journal, you follow whatever their guidelines state.
• Use strong, clear language to articulate your perspective, but always support your points with evidence from the provided papers or other relevant sources.

• For every sentence, ask yourself how a grumpy old scientist would respond.

  Computational biology is revolutionizing our understanding of the world around us.

  A grumpy scientist could think, "Oh, good, like I didn't already know this and read five papers with this same introduction." Use this to guide if your statement is too broad. - When listing items with (1), (a), etc. make sure to add a , or ;. For example, there is something to (a) show, (b) tell, © and see. - The Oxford comma is strongly recommended. - Avoid absolute or general statements like "best", "worst", "wrong", "only", etc. when someone could make an argument about some other approach being superior. For example, instead of

  We chose to use the ff19SB force field because it is the best for our system.

  You can say,

  Our MD simulations employed the ff19SB force field because previous publications [8, 9] have demonstrated its high performance for similar proteins.

  Instead of saying,

  Molecular dynamics is the best method.

  you can say,

  Molecular dynamics has shown promising results in similar studies. - It is important to have variety in your sentence structure and length. For example, have some short sentences, some longer ones, use semicolons, em dashes, etc. Variety makes it easier to read and maintain focus. - Minimize the amount of jumping around the reader has to do to follow your paper. For example, do not include a glossary at the end of your paper for technical terms. Explain them concisely in your writing.